Bay to Breakers closed its bib pick-up at Pier 35 on the Embarcadero at 19:00 Saturday with around 30,000 entrants confirmed for Sunday morning's 115th edition. Organisers said it was the busiest Saturday queue in five years and that around 4,300 runners had picked up bibs in the final hour, helped by a Friday-evening surge of last-minute online registrations that pushed the field to within 200 of the formal cap. The Alaska Airlines-sponsored event will set off in waves from the corner of Howard and Main at 08:00 local time.
The course retains its 12-kilometre Embarcadero-to-ocean profile, with the redesigned finish on the rebuilt Great Highway promenade replacing the Ocean Beach parking lot used through 2024. The new finish gantry sits opposite the Sunset Boulevard junction and is being fed by a 600-metre runners' funnel for the first time, designed to keep the costume parade from blocking the elite finish chute on the same line. The Hayes Street Hill, the race's only meaningful climb at around 60 metres of vertical, lands between kilometres three and four as ever.
The elite race is led on the men's side by Ethiopia's Daniel Mateos, the defending champion, and Kenya's Wesley Kipkogei, who ran 27:51 at the Healthy Kidney 10K in April. The women's race features the Eritrean former half-marathon champion Rahel Tewelde and the American Emma Grace Hurley, fresh from her runner-up finish at the Amway River Bank Run 25K. Race organisers have set the appearance-fee budget around 12 per cent higher than 2025 in an attempt to lift the elite field after a low-attendance year, and prize money for the top three has moved from a flat structure to a tiered one with time bonuses.
The weather forecast for Sunday morning is steady. The National Weather Service has the San Francisco peninsula at 11°C at gun, rising to 14°C by the time the bulk of the field crosses Hayes Street Hill, with light fog clearing inland by 09:30. Wind is forecast westerly at 12 kilometres per hour, a tailwind for the final downhill into the Sunset, and humidity sits at 78 per cent at the start before falling through the morning. Organisers have set heat advisory alerts to amber rather than green only as a precaution for the slowest waves.
Bay to Breakers is the oldest consecutively run footrace in the world and has used the same Embarcadero start since 1912. The new finish line and the rebuilt Great Highway both arrived in time for the 115th edition after two years of construction on the Pacific seafront, and event director Joe Caton confirmed on Saturday afternoon that the centipede competition, the formalised 13-person costume class that has run as a Bay to Breakers tradition since 1978, has 41 teams registered for Sunday, the highest number since the 100th anniversary in 2011.